SOURCE: Case, Kristen. “The Shock of the Old.” The New Leader 85, no. 1 (January-February 2002): 29-30.

In the following essay, Case favorably reviews A Multitude of Sins.

If ironic detachment and witty, winking allusions to the moral vacuity of consumer culture are among the hallmarks of contemporary fiction, Richard Ford's writing is a bold asterisk on the current page of literary history. In his new collection of short stories, Ford revisits the distinctively unfragmented moral landscape of his earlier work, most notably The Sportswriter and its sequel, Independence Day, for which he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1995. He reasserts claims that in the hands of a lesser author would appear quaintly old-fashioned: that our lives have real importance, that there is such a thing as sin, that all of our actions, no matter how seemingly insignificant, have consequences. It is a testament to Ford's...